Marshall McLuhan: Quotes about the world

Marshall McLuhan was Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist. Explore interesting quotes on world.
Marshall McLuhan: 832 quotes16 likes

“The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 99

“The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, The Education of Mike McManus, TVOntario, December 28 1977

“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”

Marshall McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Context: The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. (p. 36)

“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. (p.46)”

Marshall McLuhan book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Understanding Media (1964)

“Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry?”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 141

“King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 16

“The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature…The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.”

Marshall McLuhan

Media as the New Nature, 1969, p. 14
1960s

“Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere."”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.9-10

“The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 61

“Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 24

“We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation.”

Marshall McLuhan

xx
1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 146

“The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 21

“Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 30

“Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.99

“Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.”

Marshall McLuhan

College and University Journal, Volumes 6-7, American College Public Relations Association, 1967, p. 3
1960s

“Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.”

Marshall McLuhan

Variant: Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)
Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 13

“Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 90

“The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 291

“The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 136